Naturalistic spatiotemporal modulation of epiretinal stimulation increases the response persistence of retinal ganglion cell

Objective. Retinal stimulation in blind patients evokes the sensation of discrete points of light called phosphenes, which allows them to perform visually guided tasks, such as orientation, navigation, object recognition, object manipulation and reading. However, the clinical benefit of artificial vision in profoundly blind patients is still tenuous, as several engineering and biophysical obstacles keep it far away from natural perception. The relative preservation of the inner retinal neurons in hereditary degenerative retinal diseases, such as retinitis pigmentosa, supports artificial vision through the network-mediated stimulation of retinal ganglion cells. However, the response of retinal ganglion cells to repeated electrical stimulation rapidly declines, primarily because of the intrinsic desensitisation of their excitatory network. In patients, upon repetitive stimulation, phosphenes fade out in less than half of a second, which drastically limits the understanding of the percept. Approach. A more naturalistic stimulation strategy, based on spatiotemporal modulation of electric pulses, could overcome the desensitisation of retinal ganglion cells. To investigate this hypothesis, we performed network-mediated epiretinal stimulations paired to electrophysiological recordings in retinas explanted from both male and female retinal degeneration 10 mice. Main results. The results showed that the spatial and temporal modulation of the network-mediated epiretinal stimulation prolonged the persistence of the retinal ganglion cell's response from 400 ms up to 4.2 s. Significance. A time-varied, non-stationary and interrupted stimulation of the retinal network, mimicking involuntary microsaccades, might reduce the fading of the visual percept and improve the clinical efficacy of retinal implants.